Frisco mom missing with 2 kids had troubled past with courts, police

Two months before Nicole Dobry disappeared with her two small children, causing Frisco police to worry that she might try to flee overseas with them, a divorce-court judge slashed her visitation hours and ordered her to see a therapist.

A psychologist had found the 37-year-old mother to be dishonest, paranoid at times and possibly delusional. CPS caseworkers believed she had repeatedly coached her daughter to make false molestation accusations against her ex-husband.

Frustrated with the court decisions, Christopher Dobry said, his ex-wife often talked to friends about fleeing with their 6-year-old daughter, Sarah, and 2-year-old son, Gavin, to her native Vietnam.

Last week, she picked the children up for an overnight visit and never came back. Police found her car, purse and cellphone left behind and have been looking for her since.

Meanwhile, Christopher Dobry has been fearing the worst.

“I’ve lived with her for nine years, and I’ve seen her raging temper,” he said. He called police to the house many times leading up to their 2010 separation, telling them his wife had thrown glasses or dinner plates or left holes in the wall.

“And that’s the times she’s not on the run from the police department,” Christopher Dobry said. “I know her selfishness well enough to say that if the kids were slowing her ability to get away, she’d drop them someplace on the road or lock them away in a closet.”

In March 2011, Sarah began telling her teachers that her father had locked her and her brother in a bedroom, starved them and fondled her, according to an affidavit Christopher Dobry wrote for his divorce trial.

But school staff saw no signs of abuse and didn’t believe the story, according to the affidavit. And Sarah, a bright, well-spoken girl, later told a CPS caseworker that it was just a joke.

But Sarah repeated the story, or others like it, more than a half-dozen times over the next 12 months. The caseworker became convinced that Nicole Dobry was coaching the girl.

At least twice, court documents state, she took Sarah to a doctor, complaining the girl had physical signs of sexual abuse. The doctor never found any.

Three days after Christmas last year, the affidavit states, police were investigating Nicole Dobry’s claim that her ex-husband burned Sarah with a cigarette when the girl told a detective: “Mommy told me to say it.”

The history is strikingly similar to that of Kimberly Smith, a Fort Worth woman who abducted her daughter and fled with her to New Mexico in February, prompting an Amber Alert and weeklong police search.

Just before the abduction, the girl had reportedly recanted molestation charges against her father. She told a counselor that her mother had concocted the story.

Early in the Dobrys’ divorce trial, a court-ordered evaluation found that Nicole Dobry may have lied or “lost contact with reality” during interviews.

Besides doubting the mother’s molestation allegations, the examiner was skeptical about her claims that Christopher Dobry had once tried to kill her and had molested his sister.

When a judge gave Christopher Dobry primary custody of the children in May, he wrote that the mother’s actions amounted to emotional child abuse and ordered her to see a therapist versed in anger management and “false memory syndrome.”

Christopher Dobry says he saw no evidence his ex-wife ever attended sessions, but he let her see the children anyway.

She would pick them up at a Frisco McDonald’s every Thursday evening and bring them back Friday morning.

She was usually late dropping them off, Christopher Dobry said. But last Friday, he sat at the restaurant for an hour and a half, eating an Egg McMuffin and waiting.

He tried to call his ex-wife several times. Then he called his lawyer. And then police.

Anyone with information on the mother and children’s whereabouts is urged to call detectives at 972-292-6010.

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